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Funding for medical training flawed - Pandor Tamar Kahn Science and Health
Business Day
2005-05-20

Education Minister Naledi Pandor said yesterday that the current funding model for the training of doctors, dentists and pharmacists was fundamentally flawed, and urged Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to help develop a co-ordinated system.


The ministers haven't sufficiently engaged the issue, and they must do so fairly urgently, she said at a conference concerning the financing and training of health-care professionals. Speakers highlighted tension between the education and health departments over who should pay for clinical, or on-the-job, training for health-care professionals. At the moment preclinical (undergraduate) training is paid for by universities with funds from the education department. The disagreements arise at the clinical level, where students are supervised by specialists who divide their time between teaching, research and seeing their own patients.

Provincial health departments receive funds from the health departmernt, called the health professionals training and development grant, to pay for this clinical training. Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge said her department believed the academic costs incurred by provincial health departments for clinical training should be borne by universities, and not the health department. However, Pandor said she was opposed to transferring the funding of clinical training to the education department. She suggested funding for clinical training should remain with the health department, but administered at national, instead of provincial, level. This will enable the development of a single framework and set of principles that would underpin the establishment of appropriate teaching and research platforms across the country as a whole. she said.

Pandor also raised concerns about the declining research output in the field of clinical medicine, citing research by the Committee of Health Deans, which found a 12% drop in publications between 1999 and 2004. She attributed the decline to increased service delivery demands on health-care professionals, warning that a drop in research activity threatened future standards of health-care services.

(Source: Business Day, May 18, 2005).

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